Open Access: Teach with OER

OER are becoming more prominent in higher education. They facilitate a quicker transition to online teaching, help educators reuse and create innovative learner-centered materials, improve access to education, and save resources.
 

Teaching Benefits

Using OER in the classroom presents a unique opportunity to customize your courses and get your students more involved in their own learning. 

• Since OER can be remixed and revised, it's possible to create customized resources that fit your specific course.
• Students who have their course materials from day one, won't have a delay in learning or need to play catch up later.
• Students can review and revise existing resources to improve them and to help them master a subject.
• Students could create resources to add to their portfolios.
• Resources that students create could be licensed for reuse in order to benefit others.

• Open Learning Initiative

  Free online courses and course materials are offered by Carnegie Mellon University.

• Teaching Commons

  A showcase of high-quality open educational resources from leading universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions and hosted by bepress, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, k-12 materials, and more.

• TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa)

  A bank of OER, linked to the school curriculum and designed to support teachers and teacher educators in developing active approaches to learning. The network is coordinated by The Open University, UK. Contains links to other Africa-centered OER.

• nanoHUB

  Provides over 1600 open teaching and learning resources: online presentations; course material; learning modules; podcasts; simulation tools. Created by the NSF-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology.

Discipline-Specific Resources

Business

• Entrepreneurship and Innovation Toolkit

  A textbook on entrepreneurship published by the Edwards School of Business at the University of Saskatchewan.

• The Business Plan Development Guide
  A textbook on developing business plans published by the Edwards School of Business at the University of Saskatchewan.

Mathematics

• Abstract Algebra: Abstract and Applications

  An open algebra textbook for one or two-semester undergraduate course in abstract algebra. Written by Thomas W. Judson, Robert A. Beezer of the University of Puget Sound.

• Active Calculus

  An activity-driven text in a format that is freely accessible to students by Matthew Boelkins, David Austin, & Steven Schlicker of Grand Valley State University. Updated in August 2017.

• American Institute of Mathematics list of approved Open Textbooks

  A list of open textbooks that meet the evaluation criteria set by the AIM editorial board.

• Elements of Discrete Mathematics

  An introductory web-textbook on discrete mathematics by Richard Hammack.

• Introduction to Probability, Statistics, and Random Processes
  An open access, peer-reviewed textbook intended for undergraduate as well as first-year graduate level courses on the subject. Written by UMass Amherst's own Hossein Pishro-Nik.

Psychology

• Noba Project

  A collection of openly licensed psychology textbooks.

• Saylor Psychology 101: Introduction to Psychology

  An open Psychology textbook created by Saylor Academy.

Physics

• Variational Principles in Classical Mechanics

  OER textbook on classical mechanics that compiles 15 years of lecture notes by Prof. Douglas Cline, from the Physics Department at the University of Rochester.

Languages

• Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL)

  A federally funded collection of OER based at the University of Texas that offers primarily foreign language educational resources.

• Live Lingua

  A collection of U.S. Government created public domain language eBooks and a/v resources for almost every language.